I am asked often about the ins and outs of Amazon Web Services by C-levels, directors and managers. They aren't looking for nitty gritty nuances of scripting with all the API of their Elastic Compute Cloud, they are just interested in the general overview of the way the'cloud' functions.

When describing AWS for the first time to managers (or anyone, for that matter) it is ideal to speak in concepts instead of in concrete terms. I have also noticed it's beneficial to attempt and tangiblize the discussion with familiar terms. Using terms like&quot;Elastic IP&quot; gets quizical looks, but calling it a publicly accessible IP address helps people to get a better overall grasp of concepts before using the AWS conditions for things.

Hierarchical Organization

In a really high degree, you can think about EC2 as a global computing environment. Within EC2 are geographical regions that can be thought of as information centers. Inside of these data centers are computer clusters which in AWS parlance are called Availability Zones:

- EC2 (think: cloud)

-- Regions (think: info center)

--—- Availability Zones (believe: pc cluster)

Inside of an Availability Zone, we have can make virtual machines from custom or predefined Amazon Machine Images, or AMIs. An AMI can be thought of as a snapshot of machine that you can load and operate within the cloud with an Availability Zone. Every time you take an AMI and start it, it's called an instance of the AMI. You are able to choose an AMI and begin it several times, every time creates a new case.

Instances are virtual machines that are running, and I really mean they are virtual. If precautions aren't taken, these digital machines may wink out of existence and cause a great deal of consternation. So you don't really want to think of an Instance as something that's strong and persistent. It is only a component of computational tools.

To help keep your information intact even when an Instance expires, you may use many different AWS providers but among the very common ones would be the Elastic Block Store, or EBS. Consider EBS as a Hard Disk. It's possible to make an EBS from 1GB to 1TB and'install' it on any of your digital machine Instances. So, in case you experience an Instance that is running your website and you wish to make certain that the database stays healthy even when the Instance disappears, then you may use an EBS'hard drive'. In the event of AWS, you have created an EBS quantity and mounted it on an Instance.

Other Virtual Storage

There are other services that you could have employed besides EBS for holding this fantastic database of yours. By way of instance, the SimpleDB, or SDB, is a totally reasonable substitute and could be preferred in certain scenarios. However, SDB is a particular support for basic database delivery, whereas EBS is a generalized storage alternative. There is also the Relational Database Service, or RDS that offer robust database services outside SDB. The alternative of service is often determined by the needs of the solution.

Virtual Backup

If we want to secure that data we now have on our EBS volume, we aren't from the woods yet since even hard drives can fail. We will want to back this up into more stable storage. For this we could use the Simple Storage Option, or S3 for short. It's possible to think of S3 as a readily available tape backup. Each of these directories is referred to as a bucket from the S3 world. Because it is a fantastic stable storage system, you'll want to backup your EBS volume(s) into S3 periodically. And, when you've customized your Instance, you will want to save a new picture of it in S3 also. In this manner, if your attentively customized Instance or EBS volume crashes for any reason, you are able to pull them out of your copy in S3 rather quickly and get up and running .

Robust Security

Well, all of this would be worthless if we didn't have good security to be certain our solution was hacked. Two concepts are employed in AWS for safety purposes. The first is a set of keys which allows you and your programmers to access your systems. These are public/private important pairs and digital certificates necessary to securely log in the case. The second, referred to as a security set, can be thought of as a firewall setup. AWS Advanced Networking make a security group that defines how outside entities - like internet browsers, or remote desktops, or ftp, or email, etc. - can or cannot access your Instance.